l'ho visto in un film una volta

[mallorys_camera]

I’ve been in a Mood.

And remain in a Mood.

And though I’m pretty sure the Mood has very little to do my day-to-day life – my day-to-day life could be more pleasant, sure: I could win Lotto; I could go into a fugue state and magically complete all those manuscripts lying around on my desk; I could find a source for those metal Mexican soda bottle caps, which I need for the Art Installation; but let’s face it: my day-to-day life is profoundly okay – still: I process the Mood as though it springs from events in my day-to-day life.

Really, the Mood has to do with the absence of ambient sunlight.

Vitamin D, the lightbox, and the elliptical bike got me through a good chunk of the winter, but now I’m flagging.

###

Tax Bwana remains kind of a clusterfuck.

I repositioned myself in the trenches as Free Tax Preparer to the poor, the halt, and the lame. Lots of those in Poughkeepsie! Poughkeepsie is a little piece of the South Bronx in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

But I find myself missing the old folk whose taxes I used to do when I worked in Hyde Park.

Even though the old folk has lots of capital gains, and I don’t like doing the paperwork associated with toting up capital gains taxes.

###

Anyway, I ended up watching Nights of Cabiria last night.

Fellini is my very favorite filmmaker. (Big surprise, right?)

I hadn’t seen Nights of Cabiria for years and years. Maybe not since I was 15.

When I was a teenager, I lied my way into a number of jobs, one of which was as a candy girl at a little indie/revival movie palace called the Thalia on 95th and Broadway. As a result, I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of just about every art house movie produced in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, and France throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and I developed a lifelong fascination with independent movies.

(That fascination does not extend to movies in general. I don’t see Hollywood as a vector for serious art; I see it as an assembly line industry that’s subordinate to the dictates of capital. I’m never gonna watch a Marvel Hero movie or a Star Wars franchise unless someone pays me or holds a gun to my head.)

I remember thinking Cabiria was not one of Fellini’s best when I saw it at age 15. In fact, it kinda bored me.

Giulietta Massina, whom I love/love/loved beyond human measure in La Strada, reminded me of Lucille Ball. At that time – little snob that I was – I did not like Lucille Ball.

When I watched the film again, I realized the impersonation was deliberate. Which, of course, makes perfect sense: Amo Lucy would have had to have been a staple of Italian TV circa 1957.

Anyway, about Cabiria as about so much else, my 15-year-old self was wrong/wrong/wrong.

Cabiria is brilliant. Its ending is amazing. Note please how Massina’s smeared mascara incidentally recreates the Sad Tramp clown face. There’s a lot of Chaplin in her Cabiria performance, too.